- News Items of Interest to CWOP Members June 20, 2009 - In the July issue of the Texas Parks and Wildlife Magazine there is an Weather Watchers Article that says... That is a lot of weather to negotiate. The professional weather services and research centers parse out most of the details for us, but multitudes of Texans have also taken our extreme weather variables to heart. Want to know the current weather stats at pinpoint locations in Crowley, Midlothian or Frisco? How about Texline or Muleshoe? Hundreds of Texans maintain weather stations in their own backyards as members of the Citizen Weather Observer Program. These citizen scientists collect weather data and upload it to state and national weather service centers. They offer real-time conditions and detailed climate data. In essence, they provide weather quality assurance for the state.
June 16, 2009 - The Omaha World-Herald recently published a Father's Day Article. The article is about Weather Stations and Weather Radios being great gifts for Dad on his day. We couldn't agree more, especially since the article mentions CWOP.
June 14, 2009 - All CWOP weather data go through the findU servers. For the first ten days in June, there were 30,623,084 packets reaching findU (more than 3 million a day, 35.4 a second), of these 11,874,362 were weather data packets (1.1 million wx reports a day, 13.7 a second). The findU servers got an average of 1,610,478 hits per day during the month of May.
May 26, 2009 - Every successful CWOP search now returns a link to the closest CWOP member web cam. This link is at the bottom of the returned page. If any of these links don't work, let me know, russ at wxqa dot com.
May 17, 2009 - A 1.5 Mbyte PowerPoint Presentation on solar radiation measurements made by citizens including comparisons with NOAA solar radiation measurements was given last week at the Climate Monitoring Division Annual Meeting at the NOAA Earth Systems Research Laboratory in Boulder, CO.
May 05, 2009 - Karl Uppiano (CW3375) reports that his 1-Wire Weather Service for Java software now supports the new WSI603A Weather Instrument Kit from AAG.
April 25, 2009 - Visibility reports for METAR sites have been added to the NOAA mesonet map. The visibility in miles shows up below the cursor, and also in the station histories. Histories continue to take a while--maybe 20 seconds--to appear.
April 9, 2009 - From Don Eick of the NTSB: "MADIS helps us with the mesoscale applications and fill the gap in between airport observations. We also have highway and railway accidents which of course always don't match up with airports. In the Colgan Air accident near Buffalo, I am using the MADIS network data for temperature, dew point, and wind data. We have some reports of mixed precipitation in the area and the local area reports are of interest. We used MADIS also in a recent fire fighting helicopter accident in northern California located away from normal airport observations. MADIS and Mesonetworks were critical to help determine wind and temperature data, and to help determine density altitude for performance impacts." CWOP is the largest mesonet in the MADIS dataset, and Don adds "Keep up the good work!"
April 4, 2009 - Gerry Creager, AP009, has just recently brought up another CWOP server, CWOP4, and it is listed here. This new server is reached just like the other CWOP servers, by using cwop.aprs.net as the server designator in your local software.
Mar 25, 2009 - There is now a way to compare solar radiance from NOAA calibrated stations and from CWOP stations. Here's a comparison plot of a Surface Radiation Calibrated station (SRCBON) and eight CWOP stations located in Illinois and Indiana.
Mar 15, 2009 - Allen Kam of the Seattle NWS Weather Forecast Office reports that for the past 2-3 years the Seattle WFO has included a section on CWOP in ALL of their spotter training sessions. They do 6-10 training sessions each year. The spotters section of their web site has a link to a CWOP Recruiting Item under "Transmitting Data from your Weather Station to the NWS".
Mar 12, 2009 - Ron Pippin, CW5020, reports that the latest Davis Weatherlink software update, 5.8.3, appears to fix several issues.
Mar 05, 2009 - The number of entries in the CWOP database passed 15,000 today and is at 15,009 this evening. Some of these are active and some are inactive. A few people have more than one entry, but not very many. So, it is a correct statement to say that the total CWOP membership is about 15,000.
Mar 01, 2009 - Here's a zip file that shows the last packet received from each weather station during February where the first number is the number of days packets were received during the month. Stations active only one day are not listed since they are probably an error. Files like this are used to generate the stations/month graph.
Feb 23, 2009 - Here's a current ARRL News item about CWOP and other organizations and public service activities.
Feb 09, 2009 - CWOP member Jeff Ruys, CW2323, did a neat mapping project that shows maps of current CWOP stations in any area of the world. You can click on a station icon and see the current weather data from that station.
Jan 31, 2009 - New CWOP member George Allen operates two weather stations in New England. Both stations are part of a network that monitors haze and air pollution with web cams. You can check the current images for DW2257 in the Boston area and DW2258 at Winter Harbor, Maine by going down to near the end of the CWOP Members Web Page and Web Cam List here.
Jan 18, 2009 - Davis has announced a number of firmware updates for the Vantage Pro 2 weather station that is widely used within CWOP. The updated firmware release is 1.82 and may be downloaded here.
Jan 12, 2009 - At the AMS Annual Meeting in Phoenix this week, a CWOP Poster is being given by Gerry Creager, AP009/N5JXS.
Jan 01, 2009 - A graph of the searches per day done by the CWOP Search Tool in 2008 is shown here. The large daily increases in the first 7 months are due to 2008 APRS-IS conditions that caused traffic changes shown here and here. However, the large increase in searches during Nov 6-13 when the average number of searches per day increased to 1081, is due to Google finding the CWOP Search Tool and using it. For comparison, the CWOP Search Tool use in 2007 is shown here.
Dec 24, 2008 - Davis Weather has posted a number of firmware updates for its Vantage Pro 2 products. The current firmware release is 1.80 and may be downloaded here. This firmware fixes a number of bugs that have been problematic in the past.
Dec 20, 2008 - CWOP has members (both active and inactive) in 127 different countries. You can search through the list and find a member from any of those 127 countries by using the two letter internet code for that country preceded by a comma and space as discussed in the directions of the CWOP Search Tool.
Nov 29, 2008 - CWOP is now ranked third in the Google Directory category: science; earth sciences; meteorology; as shown here.
Nov 19, 2008 - Mathematica version 7 has just been released, and it includes support for the WeatherData[] function. This gives access to both current weather conditions worldwide as well as historical data. The list of sites covered includes all the CWOP stations. There are many interesting ways of viewing the data. The folks at Wolfram Research have also been providing hosting space for the weather.gladstonefamily.net server and the wxqc mailing list.
Sep 18, 2008 - The fundraising effort to cover findU moving, equipment and operations cost referred to in the Sep 03 item below, has been successfully completed. Thanks to all CWOP members who donated.
Sep 10, 2008 - The primary findU server is up and running at the new ISP located in PA. Within the next day or so, both the primary and the secondary findU servers will be operating normally.
Sep 03, 2008 - The primary findU server will be moving from FL to PA early next week. The server will be pulled Monday, shipped overnight, and should be up sometime Tuesday if things go as planned. All services will be moved to the secondary findU server in TX over the next few days. Some findU pages may load slower than usual, but almost everything should work. CWOP urges you to donate to cover the cost of this server relocation and operation.
Aug 17, 2008 - Due to ISP changes, the primary findU server, located in Florida, will be moved to a different location within the next six weeks. The change should be transparent to CWOP users because the secondary findU server, located in Texas, can carry the entire data stream. Last month, the findU servers provided 12,455,837 wxpage responses. Weather pages were second only to the find command which provided 16,243,193 pages.
Aug 07, 2008 - The daily number of weather stations on APRS-IS is shown over the past 3 years here. The drop to the far right is July 19 when the core servers started accepting only verified packets. The drop just before that is Apr 10-12 when the Tier 2 servers started accepting only verified packets.
July 21, 2008 - Changing the APRS core servers to only accept verified packets has resulted in many weather station operators not being able to get their data to CWOP. You can track the number of CW/DW stations (last heard on 20080719) not getting data to CWOP here. This started at 1215 stations and has decreased as more people change to the "cwop.aprs.net" servers as recommended here.
July 19, 2008 - The process to change APRS core servers to only accept verified packets has started. CWOP members using the FreeWX software package should check here for suggestions on changing servers.
July 17, 2008 - In the next few days, the APRS Core servers will stop accepting unverified packets. Any CWxxxx, DWxxxx or unverified ham packets will be rejected and not reach findU or CWOP or MADIS. To prevent this from happening to their packets, CWOP members need to check the recommended servers and make changes if needed.
June 20, 2008 - Here is a second newspaper article giving even more info on Philip Gladstone and the NOAA Environmental Hero Award.
June 16, 2008 - Here is a newspaper article about CWOP's own, Philip Gladstone, and his recent NOAA Environmental Hero Award.
June 15, 2008 - Here is a diagnostic aid that may help determine if a problem (that has existed more than a few days) is with your local computer or with the APRS-IS network. If data from your registered CWOP weather station are not on findU, check here to see the last date that a packet from your station was seen on APRS-IS. Then check here to see how many other stations share that date. If only a few, then the problem is probably with your computer or software. However, if more than a few, there may have been a change in the APRS-IS on that day.
May 19, 2008 - Andy Nash, CW8637 and Meteorologist In Charge (MIC) at the NWS Burlington, VT Weather Forecast Office, has written an item about weather data from private citizens and how these data are used. You can see it on page 16 here.
May 04, 2008 - There was a short article in The New York Times today about Bradley Feldman's CWOP weather station taking the temperature of Brownstone Brooklyn. You can read and enjoy it here.
Apr 18, 2008 - This graph shows number of weather stations using different APRS servers on a daily basis since the start of the year. NH means non-ham; HM means ham; CR means CORE servers; CW means CWOP servers; and OT means other servers including Tier 2 servers.
Apr 14, 2008 - Regarding server changes, Roger Dickey (CW9396) reports "I am using open2300 software. While it has a configuration file, the first two server names are hard coded. Open2300 users will have to find the server names in the file rw2300.c, change them to cwop and recompile. I had changed my configuration file and it ‘worked’. In fact, aprswest was the hard coded default."
Apr 12, 2008 - Some APRS servers, which previously accepted citizen weather packets, no longer pass certain weather packets to the findU server (which sends the data to MADIS which sends them on to over 450 user agencies). If your weather data are no longer getting to findU or to MADIS, then you need to check about which servers you should use.
Mar 25, 2008 - There will be no weekly update to the CWOP database due to an injury to the updater (broken small bone above ankle). Hopefully things will return to near normal next week.
Mar 17, 2008 - Dave Helms (CW0350, CW0351) has developed a CWOP Archive Search using on-line Google search technology. This allows you to enter an item and find if it has been discussed on the CWOP Data Quality Discussion List. For example, enter "barometer calibration" and you'll see postings that discussed how to calibrate your barometer.
Mar 08, 2008 - With great pride, we announce that Philip Gladstone (CW0003) has been selected to receive a NOAA Environmental Hero Award on Earth Day, 2008. He was nominated by the National Weather Service, NOAA Oceanic & Atmospheric Research and the NOAA Office of Education for his volunteer effort in developing and maintaining a highly-praised web site that provides information to weather station operators. This gives citizen operators the necessary tools to improve the quality of the data they contribute to NOAA research and operations, which in turn results in better weather services for the general public. Philip is one of the key builders of CWOP and is highly deserving of this prestigious award.
Feb 26, 2008 - For those running Davis Weatherlink Software on a Windows system, Davis has issued an upgrade to the software to bring it up to V5.8.0. The new version of the software prevents crashes if the data is being accessed over a network and allows multiple connection ports. For those running Weatherlink software on a Macintosh System, they have issued upgrade V5.0.3c which resolves a problem with crashing when running Leopard systems. They also have released firmware updates for the Vantage Pro consoles in the form of Version 1.73. This fixed a bug that gave the High Rain Rate an incorrect time stamp and a bug that caused an inaccurate barometric reading at high elevation.
Feb 24, 2008 - We have started issuing CWOP IDs that start with DW followed by 4 numbers. We have run through 10,000 IDs that start with CW, so we have changed to DW and you can see the list of DW stations that have sent packets.
Feb 21, 2008 - There was a fire (or at least, smoke) near the cwop.aprs.net server at Texas A&M last night. Gerry Creager reports, "The Fire Dept has left but the smoke's still here". The effects on CWOP traffic can be seen as zeros in station count and in packet count for CWOP-1, CWOP-2, CWOP-3 from 01 to 03 UTC for 20080221.
Feb 07, 2008 - The author of the software package used by all the APRS-IS servers has asked that all CWOP members use a server designation of "cwop.aprs.net" and port 14580. This changes earlier recommendations made here. Specifically, members are asked to no longer use "rotate.aprs.net" and to not use individual server names. The packet rate recommendation under item # 1 of the CWOP FAQ remains unchanged. Any changes to CWOP recommendations will be posted here.
Jan 28, 2008 - This appeared in the NWS Weather Forecast Office Seattle Winter 2007 Sky-Warn Spotter News: "Citizen Weather Observing Program (CWOP) - CWOP is a system that permits those with automated weather stations to report their data on-line to a suite of weather observation web sites. A growing number of Skywarn weather spotters are taking advantage of this opportunity. If you have an automated weather station linked to your personal computer combined with broadband or DSL communications, or you get such a system as a gift, please visit www.wxqa.com for more information if you are interested. You could join the CWOP team!"
Jan 23, 2008 - Dieter Bradbury reported this news item about Personal Weather Stations in the Portland Press Herald Maine Sunday Telegram.
Jan 21, 2008 - Yesterday, there was a slashdot posting about Personal Weather Stations that mentioned CWOP. Because of this, the CWOP web site traffic for yesterday was about eight times normal.
Jan 16, 2008 - There is a new recommendation on the maximum data packet rate that CWOP members should use to send their data. This is discussed under item # 1 of the CWOP FAQ linked from the upper right. Note that if you are sending packets more often than one every 10 minutes, you should reduce your packet rate to that and you should select the minute you transmit as pointed out in item # 1 of the CWOP FAQ.
Jan 07, 2008 - Steve Dimse reports that in 2007, the findU server received 422,262,687 weather reports and this is a 29.5% increase over 2006. Since 2000, about 1.24 billion weather reports have been received by findU.
Jan 04, 2008 - Jason Karvelot of Davis Instruments will give a CWOP-related presentation concerning Atmospheric Observations for Weather and Climate at the AMS Annual Meeting in New Orleans later this month.
Jan 01, 2008 - The CWOP Search Tool has been used for the past year as shown by the searches per day over 2007. Item #8 in the CWOP FAQ tells how to use the search tool to check your data through most of the paths they take through CWOP.
April 2002 through 2007 - Older CWOP news items are available here.
| Page generated on June 20, 2009. Site maintained by Russ Chadwick, KB0TVJ. Send any comments to russ at wxqa dot com |
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